Tim's Projects
Website Presenter

If you ever have a need to set up a PC at an exhibition in order to show visitors a website, you may find Website Presenter useful.

When a visitor comes along to have a look at your website, you really want it to start at the homepage, not the page that the last visitor looked at. I decided to create a program that would make this happen.

Website Presenter lets you set a time period before the presentation reverts to a pre-defined web page (usually your homepage). If a visitor clicks a link, the timer is reset.

There is an option to disable the opening of new windows if visitors click links that have a target of _blank or use scripting to open a new window. Open windows can also be closed automatically.

To stop visitors exiting the presentation, you can set a password; however, this option is only fully supported on Windows 98 systems.

Download Website Presenter

Contains just the program. This installation is all you need if you already have the Visual Basic runtime.

The setup program copies the VB runtime files to your Windows folder (Full Installation only), creates a Website Presenter folder in your Program Files folder, and creates an entry in your Start menu. Website Presenter can be fully uninstalled using 'Add/Remove Programs' from the Windows Control Panel.

Running Website Presenter

The quickest way to run Website Presenter is to double-click its icon in your Start menu.

You will then be presented with the dialog box shown in the screenshot above, where you can enter the URL of your website homepage and the time delay before the display reverts back to your homepage (multiples of 10 seconds, up to 9999 seconds).

You can also force the browser to work off-line, switch off a visitor's ability to open new browser windows, and make sure all open browser windows are automatically closed. Additionally, a password can be set to stop visitors from exiting the presentation.

The closeOpenWindows option makes sure all windows that include the title "Microsoft Internet Explorer" are closed when the presentation reverts to the homepage, and when visitors initiate the opening of a new window. This feature ensures that any open browser windows obscuring the presentation are removed when the presentation reverts to the homepage.

Using the Command Line

If you don't want to keep typing in the parameters, you can set up a shortcut pointing to Website Presenter and add the parameters to the command line. To enter the command line, right-click on your shortcut and select Properties. In the Target box you will see the path to the program. You can add up to six parameters to the command line as shown...

This will revert back to www.surtell.com after 60 seconds. It will also allow visitors to open new browser windows, and it will also close them automatically when the presentation reverts back to the homepage.

If a file is not found locally or in the browser cache, visitors will be prompted to go on-line (for dial-up access; if you are using an always-on connection this will never appear). Visitors may exit Website Presenter by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL since a password has not been set.

www.yahoo.com, 120, workOffline, pass:mypass

This will revert back to www.yahoo.com after two minutes. Visitors will not be able to open new browser windows via links, and visitors will not be able to go on-line. Visitors may still use features of Internet Explorer such as saving pages and opening new windows with CTRL-N. A way of disabling these features is discussed later on. The only way to exit from the program will be to enter the password 'mypass'.

Password Protection

Entering a password in the dialog box or using the pass: parameter in the command line enables the password protection facility. The password must be between 1 and 8 characters in length, and is not case sensitive.

Without password protection, visitors may exit Website Presenter by pressing the CTRL-ALT-DEL keys, or cause it to loose focus by pressing the Start key or the ALT-TAB keys.

With password protection enabled, the above key combinations will have no effect. To exit the program, the user must move the mouse to the bottom left of the screen and hold down the left mouse button whilst moving the mouse. A box will then appear allowing the password to be entered.

If you cannot remember the password, or if Internet Explorer crashes, the only way to return to Windows would be to restart the computer.

Presenting Websites

The best way to present a website using Website Presenter is to use it to browse your website live on the Internet. This is fine if you have an Internet connection available, but in most cases you won't.

In this case, getting your presentation to run smoothly may not be so easy because all of the files needed to browse the website need to be stored off-line in Internet Explorer's cache. How easy this is to do will depend on the type of website that you wish to present...

Static Websites

If the website uses only static HTML pages, place all the pages in a directory on the hard drive of the presentation computer and set this directory as your homepage in Website Presenter.

If anything on the page is normally sourced from the Internet (e.g. a hit counter), the browser will ask the visitor to log on to the Internet, which is not desirable. To stop this happening, you can select 'Never dial a connection' from Tools > Internet Options > Connections in Internet Explorer or set the workOffline parameter in Website Presenter.

If you do not have the source files of the website you are presenting, you can use Internet Explorer's 'Make available off-line' feature. Load the homepage of the website, then go to Favorites > Add to Favorites. Set a title and location for the favorite and click OK. Now, go to Favorites > Organize Favorites. Find the favorite that you created and click it. Check the 'Make available off-line' checkbox that appears and then click Properties. In the Download tab you can now tell Internet Explorer how many links deep it should go (maximum three levels), and also whether links outside the website should be followed, which you usually do not want to happen. Click OK, then OK, and Internet Explorer will download the website to its cache.

Active Websites

If your website uses server-side scripting with dynamic content you have three options:

» Provide the presentation computer with Internet access so that the visitors are directly accessing the website. If the connection or server is slow, bear in mind that pages may not appear for some time and that your visitors will not see any status messages from Website Presenter.

» Install server software (such as the Personal Web Server in Windows 98) on the presentation computer and set up the website in the same way as it is on the web server. Pages will load more quickly than if you used the previous option and all of the website's features, such as search facilities, should work in the same way as on the live website.

» If you are unable to set up server software on the presentation computer, or you do not have the source files of the website you are presenting, you will need to visit each page on the website once so that each is stored in the Internet Explorer cache. For pages that have embedded links, you can use Internet Explorer's 'Make available off-line' feature as described previously. However, this is unlikely to download all pages of an active website since pages on such websites can be created on the fly in response to user inputs. One example is a search results page, others would be pages that only appear as a result of JavaScript or VB Script scripting.

If you know how your website works, you can create special client-side scripts that can, for example, load all the pages based on records in any databases such that the pages can be viewed off-line from the cache.

You must also set workOffline in the Website Presenter command line/dialog box so that Internet Explorer will not try to retrieve files from the Internet, but will instead get them from the cache. Note that Website Presenter has no control over pages loaded into new browser windows.

Some Notes and Tips

» The computer you are using must have Microsoft Internet Explorer installed.

» If a password is not set, visitors can still switch to other programs that are running using ALT-TAB or by pressing START. If keyboard input is not required to use your website, it would be a good idea to hide the keyboard and only allow visitors to use the mouse or trackball. That way, visitors don't have any opportunity to tamper with your computer.

» Visitors can still right-click on the page, where they would be able to see the properties of the page, open links in a new window (if allowNewWindows is set) or save pages to disk. It is possible to disable right-clicking in your web pages by inserting the script below into each page...

» A better solution to the above problem is to set up some Internet Explorer restrictions. These are settings in the Windows Registry that allow certain features of Internet Explorer to be switched off. In this case you want to disable the 'context menu', so you need to use the value noBrowserContextMenu. Whilst you are at it, you can use the noFileNew value to disable the opening of new browser windows with CTRL-N. This value does not affect the Website Presenter allowNewWindows option. To add these values, run the Registry Editor by going to Start > Run and typing "regedit". Open the branches of the tree that appears as follows: HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Policies > Microsoft > Internet Explorer > Restrictions. If Restrictions is not there, add it by going to Edit > New > Key.

Once in the Restrictions key, go to Edit > New > DWORD Value. Enter "noFileNew" for the name and press Enter. Double-click on the new value and change Value data to 1. Do the same for the noBrowserContextMenu value. You should find that the changes have the desired effect. If you need to disable these values, just change their Data value back to 0. Remember that errors in changing the Windows Registry can cause Windows to misbehave, so it is wise to make a backup of the Registry before making changes. To do this, go to File > Export Registry File and make sure the Export range is set to All.

» Internet Explorer will always display a vertical scroll bar, even if the web page does not require it. To get around this, you can display your whole website in a frame. Create a file called 'frameset.htm' from the code given below. Substitute your website homepage URL where shown and use 'frameset.htm' as your homepage in Web Presenter.

» Sometimes, even if workOffline is set in Website Presenter, Internet Explorer will refuse to load pages from its cache. If this happens, leave Website Presenter running, then load Internet Explorer and click File > Work Offline. When you switch back to Website Presenter, it should load pages from the cache. You can then close Internet Explorer (or let Website Presenter do it for you if closeOpenWindows is set).

» Why not create a screen saver promoting your website? Introduce your website in large text and invite visitors to press a key to view it. When they do, Website Presenter will appear showing your website's homepage. I used a software package called Illuminatus Opus to create a screen saver for the SELMEC website. Another way would be to create a splash page for your website and use this as the Website Presenter homepage.